All of These Must Go

December 28, 2014

She was tall and had the longest, thinnest legs I’ve ever seen. She was like a giraffe, a giraffe with a pixie cut, anyway. Her delicate fingers held her cell phone as she snapped photos. She walked in whispers, in waves. And then in one fell swoop, she saw my books. “Oh,” she said. I could smell the distaste as the word dropped from her lips and hung there. “These, all of these must go,” she said, and one of her arms gestured, as if I could use a magic wand to POOF them away.

Giraffe lady’s business card was shiny, waxy, and I folded it over and over upon itself. Her leopard-print kitten heels clicked along our scuffed up wood floors. They sneered at my New Balance tennis shoes from Costco.

I couldn’t keep up with her. She wanted our life put into boxes, compartmentalized, hidden, camouflaged. Like only the house existed, not the people inside of it. No evidence. Clear the crime scene, no human beings have deigned to breathe within the confines of these walls! No children or adults have sullied this place, look how pristine it is!

Comments

I can’t even tell you how excited I was to see an email with a new blog post from you in my inbox this morning. Welcome back. 🙂 Your writing is as beautiful and evocative as always.

The staging process is so weird. I know the conventional wisdom is to make the house a blank slate of sorts so people can imagine themselves living in it. But I could never imagine myself living in a house with no books, and I could never feel any sort of kinship with someone who doesn’t appreciate them.